Facebook CPC and CPM among ASEAN countries

Some weeks ago I got one of these non-common campaign requests that pushes you to write a new post, however I recognize I couldn’t foresee such a big performance contrasts among neighbor markets.

An Indonesia perfume manufacturing client based in Indonesia requested a regional Facebook Marketing campaign in 13 countries, 7 of them in the ASEAN region, for a brand new product launch . The campaign should kick off at the same time and there was no previous data to use as a reference

As it was a brand new product for a new brand, we agreed to go for a testing campaign to see whether the Facebook “estimations” were good or not. In this research there are other non ASEAN countries like Sri. Lanka, Taiwan or Korea are not part of the but I keep them as it may be a good reference for other readers 😉

As a branding campaign, the main objectives were clear, get a first reference of each country for:

First step: find some third parties benchmarks. After some research, lots of Facebook official partners samples and some extremely funny reports (the Sales Force one that allocates Vietnam in Korea) it is easy to realize that most of the available data was not very trustworthy.

Salesforce Report: nice chart, nicer bug 😀

Overall, some minutes after doing this brief research I decided to make my own and write this post 🙂

Second step: Facebook estimation. Secondly, its recommended to compare the Facebook estimations you get on the Advert Set configuration (this info is showed only in Manual configurations) .

Estimations are shown in local currencies. In this case, our account is based in Vietnam Dongs – VND

After doing the set-up for all these countries, here it is the ‘Facebook CPM suggestion’ for this pool of countries:

As you can imagine, we decided to quit Japan

Third step: testing phase. After doing that we were ready to go for the testing campaign. Some notes:

Same set-up: Campaign optimized to obtain a low cost-engagement. Reccommended for branding.

Same banner.

Same audience indicators (simple audience set-ups are recommended in testing campaigns, once you get experience in that market, you can use this numbers as a reference to optimize)

Same wordings: content. To be a 100% accurate benchmark we should have used local languages, however our time limitation forced us to do everything in English

Audience set-up for Malaysia

So, after 6 days and $600 among the 8 countries, here we have the results:

Overall, the Cost per engagement was much lower than expected, which was good news in terms of branding. The CPC performance was obviously bad due to the engagement-optimized set up, however I recognized that I expected better values at Vietnam and Myanmar. Taiwan surprisingly high and Malaysia high too considering how English friendly this country is

Ultimately, let’s analyze the quality score of the same banner and content for each country:

NOTE: This campaign was done with one single post. The post was exactly the same for every country (image and content). Text was typed in English which should carry out lower costs for English friendly countries like Malaysia, Sri Lanka or Philippines

The campaign belongs to Chemarome, a multinational fragrance producer that operates in Europe, Asia, Middle east and Central Africa.